Cascadia today: Progress in avoiding Seattle teacher strike + ICE arrests surge in Cascadia + reclaiming the name Tahoma

"Promising progress" on contract for Seattle teachers

West Seattle Blog reports that the Seattle Education Association, the union for the city's public school teachers made "promising progress" on a new contract with Seattle Public Schools in marathon negotiations last night that went well into the early morning hours as a midnight deadline for a deal expired. Teachers have authorized a strike if a deal isn't reached.

The big issue Seattle teachers are fighting for in this contract is funding for special education instructional assistants. SPS, seeking to balance its budget, wants to eliminate up to 100 assistants, leaving teachers to deal alone with special-needs students. The teachers' union has a great explainer about how this would impact classrooms. SPS is doing this because the legislature has failed to adequately fund schools and as SPS superintendent Brad Shuldiner said in an article at KUOW, "we're broke." Shuldiner however is being taken to task on social media for a longwinded, rambling email he sent to parents criticizing teachers and trying to prove he's not a bad guy since he did some labor organizing in college.

Meanwhile, Willamette Week writes that Portland Public Schools has new data on enrollment that likely means the district will need to close up to 15 schools to address budget woes.

Want to help? If you live in Washington, please call or email your legislators and follow SEA advice in urging state lawmakers to take several action steps next session:

Close the Safety Net “donut hole” — $30,371 per student, $12.76M a year in Seattle alone

Report whether SB 5263 actually closed the gap for districts

Stop counting students with IEPs as fractional students

Mapping landslide risk in Cascadia

After tragic landslides and flash floods on the Nepal/Tibet border and in the Grand Canyon over the past week, all eyes are on the possibility of fatal landslides and floods. Coincidentally, the University of Washington reports that its researchers have produced a Landslide Exposure Database, which maps out areas at risk from landslides in the US – and here in Cascadia. A 2014 landslide in Oso, Washington in the Cascade foothills killed 43 people, and logging in the area may have contributed to the hillside's instability. Residents of the Mendenhall Valley near Juneau, Alaska, meanwhile have had to deal with annual glacial outburst floods thanks to climate change melting glaciers. Thankfully no one has been killed there yet.

More data on ICE kidnapping surge in Cascadia

Oregon Capital Chronicle reports that ICE has seized more than 700 people in Oregon this year, the highest surge in immigration kidnappings since late 2025. In Washington, KUOW reports that ICE goons have captured more than 700 immigrants in June and July alone, and that this year, arrests have surged in Seattle, Yakima, Tukwila, and Spokane.

The immigrant led activist organization La Resistencia reports that more than 400 people were removed from Tacoma's Northwest Detention Center and flown to other camps in the US over the past week. This is likely because NWDC is near its capacity of 1,500 detainees and ICE and GEO are "making room" for a surge in kidnappings in its cruel mass deportation campaign. The majority of immigrants seized by ICE in the US have no criminal records, and fewer four percent had a past violent conviction, the New York Times reported last week.

Talk to your neighbors and join a local observer group or rapid response group today. Whistles and noise help stop these kidnappings. Don't let ICE terrorize our neighbors.

Spokane residents fighting new data centers

RANGE Media reports that Spokane county residents of all political persuasions have been attending planning commission meetings recently to oppose new data centers. RANGE has found data center companies have been in closed-door negotiations with stakeholders to build energy-sucking centers in Spokane county. The Spokane city council passed a one-year ban on new data centers within city limits in June.

In related news, Oregon Capital Chronicle reports that data centers are emerging as a key issue in the Oregon governors race between incumbent Democrat Tina Kotek and Republican challenger state senator Christine Drazan. Drazan says local communities can restrict them, but she's opposed to a statewide moratorium. A recent poll found that 71% of Oregon voters are opposed to new data centers, so this might not be a winning issue for Drazan.

Reclaiming the name Tahoma

Magic Canoe has a great essay by CMarie Fuhrman on the critical importance of reclaiming the name Tahoma for Washington's state's highest peak, which is considered a family member to Indigenous people across Cascadia. The name Mount Rainier was tacked on to the volcano by British colonial explorer George Vancouver for his friend Peter Rainier, who fought against the American colonists and was a key player in expanding the British empire in Asia. Fuhrman notes that a Puyallup tribe linguist documented more than twenty different native names for the peak. It's time to restore the rightful name to this friend.

"Six tribes relate to Tahoma as kin—Puyallup, Nisqually, Cowlitz, Squaxin Island, Muckleshoot, and Yakama. Not as landmark. Not as backdrop. As kin. Kinship requires that you belong to one another. That your existence is bound up in the other’s existence. That what harms one harms the other. That we carry each other’s names." --CMarie Fuhrman

Thanks for reading. Keep loving and keep fighting. Please join Cascadia Democratic Action and the Cascadia Poetic Lab on 7 pm Wed. Sept 2 at Vermillion in Seattle for the debut of the Cascadia poetry reading series Subduction...